Vision Quest

by Terry Davis

  I really didn’t make a very active deer watcher last night. I’ve seen plenty of deer and I was pretty sleepy, so I didn’t pay as much attention as Carla. I mostly just wanted to relax. I was dancing my toes to a quiet Don McLean tune called “Winterwood” when Carla said softly, “Here come some more.”

  Sure enough, four more deer stood at the edge of the trees.

  “Are those mule deer?” Carla asked.

  “I can’t tell,” I said. “I’d have to see their tails.” You’re supposed to be able to tell mule deer by their big ears, but I never can. They’re also supposed to be stockier than whitetails.

  “I think they’re mule deer,” Carla said.

  I sat with my eyes closed, very comfortably tucked in my corner of the DeSoto, wondering why you see more falling stars in summer than in winter. I opened my eyes and looked at Carla and then closed them again and stretched my leg until my foot found her thermal crotch. Her hand rubbed across my big wool boot sock and patted my foot. Then I felt some woolly toes pad along my inner thigh and then a warm squirrelly foot tried to make off with my acorns before I trapped it. Feeling each other’s pressure was all we were after.

  “They are mule deer,” Carla whispered. “They have very big ears compared to the others.” And her toes gave me a prod that said “I told you so.” It also made me instantly horny.

  Carla felt it with her foot and responded with more pressure. To which my cock responded with increased turgidity. “You’re supposed to relax for tomorrow,” she said.

  “I think it would be relaxing,” I replied.

  “And don’t forget,” Carla said on her way over to my side of the seat, “you said it burns up two hundred calories.”

  “We have a secret from these deer” was the last thing I remember hearing before Carla woke me in the garage this morning. She said I was sleeping so soundly when we got home from seeing the deer that she didn’t want to wake me to come to bed.

  XVI

  I decided to walk home from Dr. Livengood’s office. I weigh 149.5 on his scale, so I need all the exercise I can get. It turned out that getting his permission to drop the weight was no sweat at all. He just listened to my story, then to my chest, then pushed me on the scale. He read off 50, but it was really 49.5.

  “Shouldn’t be any problem. A little jogging and a healthy shit ought to do it now,” he said, and smiled. “Flush out that Christmas turkey.”

  “Wouldn’t have seemed like Christmas without a little white meat and turkey gravy.” I smiled sheepishly. I nearly lost control at the dinner table yesterday.

  Dr. Livengood smiled again and patted me on the shoulder as though I were a little kid and then took my weight-loss form over to his desk and signed it. Over his shoulder he handed me a Christmas card. It was from Max Mokeskey, the med student who had done his preceptorship here. Max sent his greetings to Dr. and Mrs. Livengood and in a PS said, “Please give Louden Swain my wishes for good luck in his big wrestling match.”

  “Gee,” I said. “That’s really nice of him to remember me.”

  “He’s a good boy,” Dr. Livengood said, handing me back my weight-loss form.

  “Boy,” Dr. Livengood called him. Max is probably twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. He stands probably six-four and goes maybe 220. “Boy.” I really get a bang out of old people.

  * * *

  God, it’s a beautiful day! Carla drove to work early just to drop me off at Dr. Livengood’s. It’s still pretty early. My appointment was for eight and it only took about ten minutes. People are still on their way to work. Carla’s probably drinking tea with Belle right now, sitting on a granola barrel, waiting for nine o’clock and the first customers.

  We got just enough snow last night to cover up the dog shit on the sidewalks and the bus exhaust spores in the streets. Ordinarily I’d avoid a busy street like Monroe on a walk from town. But now the traffic is slow and soft-sounding. The cars and buses seem like a herd of big, friendly animals headed for grazing ground. All of us emit little clouds of vapor. I imagine us as comic book characters with writing in our clouds. A snowcapped Toyota pickup has turned into a pronghorn antelope. Dressed in a camp cook’s apron and hat, it waves a ladle and hails me in Kuch’s voice.

  “Howdy, pilgrim,” says the antelope-cook. “How’s about warmin’ up yur ribs with a little wild onion stew?”

  “No thanks, ole stud hoss,” I say. “Can’t even take time to set. Headed for the winter rendezvous up to Fort David Thompson. Figure to wrestle Gary Shute out of all his hides and his poke o’ gold.”

  “That Shute’s quick as a snake an’ mean as an old mountain lion,” yells the pronghorn from far down the trail. “Best watch yur topknot!”

  “Best watch yourn!” I yell back. But the little cook is gone, the chuckwagon obscured by the lumbering buffalo buses. Yesterday afternoon just before Christmas dinner I finished reading a book called Mountain Man by Vardis Fisher. I’m really a sucker for a good wilderness story. Kuch had been after me to read that book for a long time.

  I like feeling a kinship with traffic. I like pretending. Carla would get a kick out of seeing me this way.

  She really loved seeing the deer last night. I had a great night, too, even though Christmas night has traditionally been an anticlimax for me. But Christmas Eve is a gas all day. I always go to a matinee, then open presents at night and have a great time at home. But Christmas night is always a bummer, because everything I’ve looked forward to is over. This Christmas night was different because of Carla and the deer, and because the thing I’ve been looking forward to most isn’t Christmas presents—it’s my match with Shute. Also, I’m just growing up.

  Carla and Cindy made yogurt all afternoon, Kuch and his dad were somewhere racing snowmobiles, and Otto hates Jesus Christ Superstar, so I went to the matinee alone. I half wanted to go alone anyway, but I called Kuch and Otto because since we were in grade school we’ve always gone to a matinee on Christmas Eve.

  Nobody except Carla understands why I like Jesus Christ Superstar so much. And even though she understands, she can’t get into it herself. I guess my reasons are pretty personal and fairly dumb. It’s just that I’ve always wanted to believe that story, and this movie version concentrates on some believable aspects.

  Christ is a guy who has committed himself to a goal none of his people clearly understands. He is disciplined and calculating in pursuit of the goal. He defines his whole reality as though the goal—eternal life for himself and everybody who believes in him—were really possible. He lives fierce and proud and then he dies. In the movie his is resurrected, but it’s okay because you feel like he deserves it. I don’t for a second believe Christ or anybody else lives on eternally, except maybe for a while as a memory or an artifact. But I do think a lot of people deserve to. I think old Jay Gatz in The Great Gatsby would certainly deserve to if he were a real person, and I think my mom and dad do. But that’s not the only reason I’m hooked on J.C.

  I know the characters in that movie. They’re real. In all my younger days in Sunday school I never heard one biblical story about characters I figured I knew. I didn’t even believe the living people in Mom’s church were real. But in the movie everybody yells and fights and cries and sweats and farts and probably fucks, and Judas has some noble qualities, and Simon is an archfreak and dancin’ fool who slobbers like the Sausage Man, and Jesus warns God he’d best take him soon before he changes his mind, and that poor fucking Pilate just wants to let Jesus off, but he can’t because it’s not part of the way things are defined.

  Pilate is a figure who really interests me. After I had seen J.C. a few times I ran across this book called The Master and Margarita at a garage sale. The cover implies it’s about the devil and supernatural stuff and I bought it for that interest. It is about the devil, but it turns out to be about a lot more, too. It’s mostly a satire on Russian artists’ unions, I guess. Anyway, Pilate is a character in it. Bulgakov, the author, shows Pilate suffering in the immortality
he achieved through his part in Christ’s superstardom.

  I can’t figure out whether God meant Pilate’s immortality as a reward or a punishment. He must have meant it as a reward, or at least a compensation, because Pilate sure couldn’t be blamed for Jesus’s death. Pilate didn’t have any choice. He couldn’t have let Christ off. He got sucked in. He had to stay within the divine scope of events. If he’d let Jesus off, it would have spoiled everything. Pilate was duped. And so was Judas.

  Anyway, in The Master and Margarita, Pilate and his dog sit on this asteroid way out in space and Pilate wonders and wonders where he went wrong with that crazy Galilean. It’s beautiful the way Bulgakov frees Pilate from the asteroid so he and his dog can at least stretch their legs in eternity.

  And then aside from what the movie makes me think about, there’s what it makes me see and hear and feel. Everybody who had anything to do with the making of that film must be a genius. The singing and dancing and rock and roll are so wild and beautiful. It makes me weak—it truly does—that human folks can produce such sounds and movements.

  There are certain points in the movie—like when Jesus is yelling at God about why he has to die—that set me free from my normal consciousness, that disrupt my competitive relationship with life. I mean when Jesus lets blast at God with that shrieking falsetto of his, I get shudders and my eyes tear. I want to jump up and scream some primal sound. What I feel is that I’m a human being and one of my human being teammates has just done a wonderful, beautiful, transcendent fucking thing with our limited human ability. And I’m proud.

  It’s exactly the same feeling I had at a pep assembly last year when Otto was named Prep Lineman of the Year in Washington. I cried. I’m not ashamed, but I am glad I was sitting in the back row so I could turn my head.

  And I had it last summer at the motorcycle races down at Castle Rock. Kuch was leading the novice main until the last lap, when he highsided into the wall coming out of the last corner. His dad and I went running out there after the pack went by to see how he was. He was going sixty or seventy when he crashed, and I figured he at least broke his back. But when we got to the corner he had his helmet off and was just leaning back against the wall, shaking his head slowly and looking at the sky. When his dad saw Kuch was okay he slowed down and we walked across the track to where Kuch and the bike were. Mr. Kuchera knelt and said, “Kenny, you’ve got to turn the gas down sometime.” They were so beautiful at that moment it made me feel like I was pretty neat just because I was their friend.

  And then I had it again this fall watching Wide World of Sports. Pelé was playing his last soccer game. I don’t know anything about Pelé except what everybody else knows—that along with Muhammad Ali, Pelé is one of the world’s best-known human beings and greatest athletes. He’s supposed to be from humble beginnings and all that. I probably wouldn’t even have watched the program if it hadn’t come on right after football and if Balldozer, whose stepmother is Brazilian, hadn’t threatened to kill me if I switched the channel.

  So about a quarter into the game—right in the middle of the action—Pelé whips off his jersey and starts to jog around the stadium. All the players stop and the crowd wails and freaks out. The camera came up close on Pelé, and he was waving his jersey high and flashing his ivories wide and crying like a baby. Then they switched to the actual sound inside the stadium, and unless you understood Portuguese you couldn’t hear a thing but foreign and semi-insane screaming. They had a guy trying to translate, but you couldn’t hear him. It didn’t matter to me, anyway, because all I could think about was Pelé’s face. And my eyes filled up with tears for him and all his great days of playing. I wish every human being in the world sometime in his life could know the glory of tears like Pelé’s. And I hope I can, too.

  I walked home from the movie happy as a fish and about two feet off the ground, just psyched about being alive and aware of all the possibilities. I stayed about that high through the evening and finally came down on the way to the park when I began thinking about Mom and Dad and another year going by and all the possibilities. A person sure doesn’t have to be a great athlete or politician or doctor or artist or entrepreneur or performer of any type or degree of greatness to find challenge in life. About half the time I think it’s a great victory just to be able to smile semiregularly, to keep your head up, to keep from giving in and getting mean. I’m not ashamed to admit I need regular transfusions of confidence to keep me going. I need some examples that remind me, by God, it can be done.

  When I got home from the park I polished all Dad’s shoes and oiled Carla’s boots even though they didn’t really need it. I didn’t think I was sleepy, but I figured I should go to bed because I didn’t want to be tired the next night and fall asleep in the middle of seeing the deer. But as soon as I cuddled up to Carla’s back and got myself all contoured and warmed, I fell right to sleep and slept like an old tree till morning.

  XVII

  The phone rings me out of my reverie. It’s junior high and Otto and I are in Belle’s basement watching her big brother and his friends take turns violating her body. She loves it. They invite us to join in, but we’re too embarrassed and scared her mom will come home. We leave and run over to Otto’s and flog our dummies raw.

  I have a superturgid boner and it hurts to sprint upstairs. I catch the phone on about the zillionth ring. It’s Dad waking me for the match. I like to take naps before a match if I can. For some reason they can be absolutely subterranean, so I like to make sure someone wakes me. No doubt I’m riddled with subconscious fears.

  Dad wishes me good luck and asks again if I want him to come to the match. I tell him no, that this one won’t be much to see, but to be sure to take off early next Tuesday night for the Shute match. He says he won’t forget.

  Back downstairs the bed’s all warm still. Belle was probably the world’s most beautiful and licentiously precocious seventh-grader. She really doesn’t look much older now, except that the rest of her body has filled out to match her tits. Her legs are like the legs of a racehorse, long, smooth-muscled, and precisely defined. In seventh grade she was mostly legs and tits and long pigtails.

  I find it strange that even though I could not ask for more or better sex, I still fantasize about other girls. Even sometimes when Carla and I are making love I’ll think of Belle. I’ll think of coming on her tits, which her brother and his friends did to her great delight. She’d rub it all over with her hands—like suntan lotion. Once when we were making love, I imagined Mrs. Brockington, my history teacher, fucking a horse. I think it was because she had shown us a movie about the potentially future-shocking effects of artificial insemination, or maybe that was the time Tanneran told us about the death of Catherine the Great.

  There’s almost nothing sexually imaginable Carla is not up for. I guess we could shit on each other or something like that, but we don’t. So I don’t figure I’m sexually frustrated. I guess maybe I just have a lot of energy that works itself out through my cock.

  I think of Belle’s nipples all pumped up and brown, of Mrs. Brockington bending over her desk with a horse mounted behind, of Romaine Lewis about to introduce his cock to Carla’s lips, of Lemon Pie’s pictures of the dick-licking boys, of Mom. Weird.

  It’s amazing how fast I come once the images start flashing and how all I can think of now is a hot chocolate float after the match if my weight is down enough.

  XVIII

  Our junior varsity is down, 19–11. I watch out the wrestling room window as Doug Bowden, our number-two man at fifty-four, shakes hands with some guy I don’t know from Lewis and Clark. I assume Doug will put this guy away in short order. Doug would be number one on a lot of other teams, but the two of us have been in the same weight class these past two and a half years now and I’ve beaten him steady. We both lettered as sophomores because the senior I beat out for number one quit. That left a guy named Warren Morford, who should have wrestled at forty-five but didn’t want to lose the weight. Warren was
heavy into anchovy pizzas, and Kuch would treat him to one every chance he got so Warren wouldn’t get to thinking about dropping down to forty-five, where Kuch was number one after Lynn Atkinson broke his neck sledding. Doug and Warren had some real battles. Whoever won would be so beat when it came time to wrestle me that I wasn’t getting enough workout, which was Coach’s motivation for the tough preparation drill we use now. If a guy’s not being pushed enough, or if he has an especially tough match, Coach will run him thirty-second rounds against the number-one men in the weight classes above. All next week, for example, I’ll be wrestling Smith and Balldozer and Otto, one after the other, every thirty seconds, just as fast as we can go. I’m going to ask Coach to put Kuch in when I’m really tired so I’ll have somebody lighter and faster—somebody like Shute—to work against.

  “Lunchtime!” I yell down to the mats below. “Lunchtime, Dougie. Eat ’im, eat ’im, eat ’im!” Carla contends we wrestlers are all a bunch of suppressed puff-jobbers with our continual references to oral relations.

  “Burn ’im, Dougie! Sting ’im! Take it to ’im one time!” yells Randy Smith, Doug’s best friend, from the other side of the window.

  The bleachers are about full and most of the cheerleaders are here. The junior varsity matches usually start with a small crowd, just parents of the wrestlers and the few really interested people who want good seats for the varsity match. But by the time they get to the 154-pound class the gym is usually about full and the crowd is into it.

  Belle stomps her feet and claps her hands and starts a takedown chant. Now our whole side of the bleachers is chanting at Doug. “Takedown!” Clap, clap, clap. “Takedown!” Clap, clap, clap. “Takedown!” Clap, clap, clap.

  Both Doug and the L.C. guy shoot for the takedown at the same time. They bump heads and go to the mat. Doug gets the worst of it and L.C. slips behind for the points. Smith and I look at each other.